4/2/16

There are lots of valid reasons not to finish a book. There are big ones, like when a book is offensive to your beliefs, or has opinions and perpetuates stereotypes that you find toxic. There are practical ones, like the book falling behind a bookshelf and you feeling too weak to move all the books so you can move the shelf and rescue it, or it falling behind the radiator of a little used room causing you to wander the house sadly and hopeless not finding it. And then there are the very small reasons, that make you wonder if should keep giving the book a chance, even though you know it will probably not work out well.

For instance, I have just put down a book at the start of the third chapter for the following small reason--

A character is sitting under an old, dying oak tree, and he remembers how he used to climb it as a boy (me--wonders if climbing oak trees is something that other people are able to do, because they haven't, in my experience, struck me as climbable, but I'm willing to give the character the benefit of the doubt, especially because I just looked at pictures of oak trees and found one even I could climb, shown at right), but then he remembers eating its fruit (and he's not thinking about acorns!).

This might be a deal breaker for me. It seems to me that the author wasn't really thinking of her tree as an oak tree after all. And if the author can't keep a tree straight, and if the copy editor didn't catch it, what other inconsistences and wrong details will there be in the rest of the book? I can no longer trust the author to smoothly deliver quality world building, and I am not inclined to keep going.

And if the species of tree doesn't matter, why is the author bothering to put it in? If Megan Whalen Turner, for instance, has a character thinking about an oak tree, I can be sure that there is a point to its oak tree-ness; maybe, I might think, it is a reference to an oak tree/character relationship in a Rosemary Sutcliff book. Maybe she is alluding to Philip of Macedon's oak tree diadem. Maybe there will more oak tree metaphorical-ness further along in the book. These things are fun to think about, but are only possible when you trust the author to build the book world with care and attention.

If the oak tree really seems meant to have been an apple tree, I'm not sure it's worth going on.

Am I being too picky? The book was ok otherwise; not great, but reasonably interesting....

20 comments:

If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. That said, I've had countless conversations with my students about the food in Flanagan's work, and they aren't at all bothered by butter on the trail and such. Not knowing the fruit of the oak... There will be more problems, later, to be sure!

A certain very popular author drove me NUTS as a child, because the ages of her characters never matched up with their grades in school. If you don't know that much about the kids you are writing about, why should I believe you know anything else about them?

I don't think it's too picky. When something hits you as false, and you can't shake it, it's time to quit. Age continuity errors bother me the most probably. (This is a typical problem in romance novels I've found.) Not as much time has past in the books as has past in real life yet the characters are aging in real time.

So, I typed "corn in Kansas" into Google (I'm just curious that way) and this was the first result http://kscorn.com/ - the website of "the Kansas Corn Growers Association and the Kansas Corn Commission"

By looking deeper I discovered that "The 2013 Kansas Corn Crop was the highest valued crop in Kansas - $2.31 billion"

But I do understand the frustration. I was born in Idaho and, while we do grow it, we're not the corn state either. Not that I want people to only think of potatoes when they think of Idaho. When people try to pin a single tag on an entire state, it's usually a bad sign.

And Charlotte, I think it is OK to put down any book for any reason. There are too many books I will never get to read, simply because I don't have enough time, for me to feel bad when I DNF one.

It's hard to make a definitive rule -- a mistake like that would drive me crazy, and yet there are certain books and series with terrible consistency problems that I still love. I think it has to do with the tone of the book as a whole. Does the verve and energy of the storytelling carry it along in spite of some factual errors or inconsistencies? I would probably forgive those lapses. Or does the fact that the author has not bothered to accurately observe some basic phenomena fatally weigh down a narrative that is already uninspiring? That's a sure DNF for me.

I always wonder, though, when I can't forgive a trivial mistake, if maybe somehow it is my fault for not being in "the right mood" to appreciate all the verve and humor that other readers might be seeing...and so I press on, often regretting the time spent after the fact. I find it very freeing to read a book that is so Very clearly certainly bad that I can be sure it is not just me and it is indeed bad.....

Hahaha, I know that feeling...but then why are there are books I find obviously, mind-blowingly bad (Girl of Fire and Thorns for example), yet other readers and critics adore them? It's not possible to eliminate the subjective element from reading entirely, do what we will.

Yeah, I don't think there can be a hard and fast rule (though I think the age consistency problems would be a deal breaker, and the corn rule seems fairly straightforward. I will try to remember to follow the Corn Rule from now on!). But like Karen said, there will almost certainly be more problems to come, preventing the reader from relaxing.

Oh, Char - oak fruit!?If nothing else, this shows the lack of a good proofreader... and yeah. Maybe not a dealbreaker entirely, but definitely that would get my antennae up. The NEXT thing I found would be the dealbreaker, whatever it was... and doubtless, there would be SOMETHING. I agree with Karen: if it doesn't work...

Yeah, I have to agree with Liviania, depending on how invested I am in the story would determine if I would finish. I actually had a really hard time with two books in particular last summer, with some writing style and subject matter that I was just not going for..yet I felt compelled to trudge further, and I have to say...they BOTH panned out to utter surprising perfection! So, I don't know if three chapters is enough, that's a personal choice...would a fruiting oak tree turn me off...yes, it would really bother me, however, everyone can make a mistake and if the story was holding me in other ways, I'd go further...but that's just me.

I think -- if you're in love with a book apart from the oak tree error, you'll be less likely to put it down. And if you put it down because of an oak tree error, you probably weren't that into it to begin with. But that is okay! I am in the camp that it's completely fine to ditch a book any time for any reason, and trust that bloggers will bring it back to you if it needs to be brought back to you. I've done that a few times and found the book still wasn't for me; and I've done it a few times and found the book to be awesome. You just never know!

Seems like a revision error. In an earlier version the author might've had it as an apple tree, then perhaps switched to an oak for reasons of rhythm or symbolism, but forgot to do cleanup on the fruit detail. I think we all make errors like that all the time, but then catch them over hundreds of revisions...

I just finished rereading THUD! by Terry Pratchett. In the climactic scene, Sam Vimes tells Cheery Littlebottom to take a message to his wife, who is ten miles away. Exit Littlebottom stage left. Then the next page, she joins in the conversation. Oops. But I keep reading because it's Terry Pratchett. (Who at that time was turning out several books a year... no time for those hundreds of rereads.)

For me I guess it comes down to how I feel about the author. And I certainly think you can put a book down any time for any reason without feeling guilty.

I think for me it depends on how engaged in the book I am otherwise. Like Sage, I'll forgive errors if I really want to read a book. But sometimes I'll take any excuse to stop. The one that bugged me most recently wasn't even an error - just something I found implausible. There's a book set 20 years after a plague-driven apocalypse (which took place in present-day US), and the survivors are still muddling along without any electricity. Um... solar panels, anyway? Find a book about fixing electrical systems? I did finish the book, but it bugged me the whole time.

I couldn't say you're being too picky because I'd feel the same. If you're pulled out of the book by such an error you're naturally going to wonder whether it'll happen again and you're going to loose a bit of that trust you started with. Most recently I read a book that contradicted itself on character details within paragraphs and whilst I finished it I'm not sure I'll read another book by the author if things like that can be missed.